Most em­ploy­ees don’t want to know how much their col­leagues earn

60% of in­ter­viewed em­ploy­ees in Latvia don’t know how much their col­leagues earn, ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion from CV Mar­ket’s re­cent sur­vey.

In the sur­vey ti­tled ‘Do you know how much your col­leagues earn?’ 33% of re­spon­dents said they don’t know and don’t want to know, 27% of re­spon­dents said they don’t know but would like to know how much their col­leagues earn. 28% of re­spon­dents said they know how much their col­leagues earn. 12% men­tioned they are well in­formed be­cause their com­pany has a trans­par­ent pay sys­tem.

The sur­vey also re­veals that among the em­ploy­ees who do not want to know about their col­leagues’ wages, the ma­jor­ity are men aged at least 35. Among the em­ploy­ees who don’t know how much their col­leagues earn but would like to know, most are young women. Most em­ploy­ees who know how much their col­leagues earn are women aged up to 35.

Em­ploy­ees who know the pay level of their co-work­ers, most work in sales, trad­ing and con­struc­tion in­dus­try. Of the peo­ple who are not in­ter­ested in their col­leagues’ wage level rep­re­sent mar­ket­ing, ad­ver­tise­ment, public re­la­tions, pro­cess­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dus­tries. Those peo­ple also of­ten work in man­age­ment. Ac­cord­ing to CV Mar­ket per­son­nel se­lec­tion man­ager Kristaps Kolosovs, se­crecy in mat­ters of pay­ment is a com­mon prac­tice, be­cause of­ten em­ploy­ees are of­fered dif­fer­ent wages for the same job de­pend­ing on their pre­vi­ous ex­pe­ri­ence, ed­u­ca­tion and other as­pects.

«Em­ploy­ers of­ten ask their em­ploy­ees to keep their wages a se­cret, say­ing that in­for­ma­tion like that could cause ten­sion among col­leagues,» Kolosovs notes.

He also said that of­ten the lack of trans­parency is noted in com­pa­nies that lack per­son­nel mo­ti­va­tion sys­tems. ‘In such cases the man­age­ment does not want to cre­ate mis­un­der­stand­ings among em­ploy­ees be­cause of dif­fer­ent wages,’ said Kolosovs.